For me, the Clip would be 100% better if it had these features:
File/folder browsing (besides the obnoxious ID3 browsing, which doesn't work for people with a large variety of music genres or 'various artists' albums)

This point alone would make the Clip 100% better. The tag browsing and play sorting is making me mad. This also has the bad side effect that the clip throws chapters inside audiobooks out of order if the files are not properly tagged. Currently, my personal workaround is to create an m3u playlist for every folder with Winamp. Though with this its still not possible to put several albums into one 'subfolder' if they are all from one artist. A discography will clog up the playlists-list. Folder browsing would solve that all. 20 Thumbs up for this feature!

Well, Rockbox is running quite good on all three Clip versions already, and they make the stock firmware somewhat unnecessary to use. Rockbox has pretty much all the features that have been requested in here.

i can only speak for the clip v2, but it's perfect now. a new bootloader has fixed the issue of the blank screen on startup. and a recent new build has disabled the adjustable cpu frequency that was the cause of it crashing. since then, it's been absolutely rock solid. i've completed several 14 hour+ battery benchmarks without issue.

Well, Rockbox is running quite good on all three Clip versions already, and they make the stock firmware somewhat unnecessary to use. Rockbox has pretty much all the features that have been requested in here.

Rockbox is considered unusable on AMS and is unsupported on everything but the Fuze v1, e200v2 and Clip v1.

Even though the bootloader installation and rockbox itself are tested, there's always a risk of BRICKING your device PERMANENTLY. The Sansa AMS (except the e200v2, for which it involves opening the player) have no known method for recovery, so this risk will not go away, even in (if any) future stable releases.

There's no known recovery method for the AMS Sansas, except for the e200v2 (see below).

Installation of a bootloader may or may not permanently disable DRM support, even if you uninstall it (this is an early and old problem, but there are reports that this may not be the case anymore).

The feature list is teasing me but I can't afford buying a second one.

Isn't the Clip+ especially with Rockbox still having real stability issues? And I thought that there still were stability issues with the other Rockbox Clip ports, although of a much lower level.

Yeah there is stability issues with the clip+ at the moment because it is being heavily tested right now, they are working on it and changes happen in what seems to me an hourly basis.

It will be a while until it is completely stable of course, but so far on versions of rockbox from the past 2 days i am at just under 40 hours of strait playing the same album with no crashes as i am running the battery benchmark utility for the 3rd time in a row now.

As for bricking your clip, as far as i know there are no reports of any bricking happening and i am not sure how they keep track of how many users they have, but i assume its in the upwards thousands easily and someone would have posted by now.

Yeah there is stability issues with the clip+ at the moment because it is being heavily tested right now, they are working on it and changes happen in what seems to me an hourly basis.

It will be a while until it is completely stable of course, but so far on versions of rockbox from the past 2 days i am at just under 40 hours of strait playing the same album with no crashes as i am running the battery benchmark utility for the 3rd time in a row now.

As for bricking your clip, as far as i know there are no reports of any bricking happening and i am not sure how they keep track of how many users they have, but i assume its in the upwards thousands easily and someone would have posted by now.

Thanks for the update--is great to hear!

And candidly, I just don't want people porting to an unstable port without understanding that.